Bill Adams reviews Tobe Hooper's unfortunate failure. Space vampires destroying London just sounds like a great film. A unique alien ship and Mathilda May as the completely naked female vampire are icing on the cake.

I just picked this up on DVD after Christmas as part of a Circuit City gift card I was given.

I realize that this movie gets trashed a lot and it is a mess in a narrative sense at times, but it's just so damn bizarre and entertaining that I have to recommend it to people. Never been another movie like it before or sense IMO.

Logged

"There is no way out of here. It'll be dark soon. There is no way out of here."

I like this movie. It is a shame that it bombed so badly when it was released, though it seems to have a small cult following these days. Showed it to a friend of mine and he liked it enough to buy the DVD.

The alien spacecraft and the setting are well done. Scenes inside the alien ship are great, with a feeling for these huge open chambers filled with floating batlike monsters. And the three naked figures the astronauts find inside of the crystal structure is striking.

Mathilda May is stunning, especially when she is walking around naked and causing all the security guards to wet their pants. Not only attractive in the nude, but she has PRESENCE.

People sucked dry of lifeforce by the space vampires are gruesome, dessicated corpses that come alive and grasp after the uninfected! While the budget didn't allow for dozens of them, we do get to see a handful and those are memorable. Especially the glassy eyes rolling around.

The low point of the film is definitely Carlsen's moaning to the Space Girl, "You're draining me. You're taking too much of me." That was pretty horrible.

See this and compare it to Tobe Hooper's "Invaders from Mars." "Lifeforce" is a much, much better film from every standpoint.

I've always wondered if they had left the title as Colin Wilson's book had it, SPACE VAMPIRES, and embraced the unavoidable b-movieness of it all, would it have worked out better in the long run. Patrick Stewart's scenes immediately spring to mind with this.

They changed a bit from the book, but I really dug connecting it to Comet Halley. It gave it a kind of an immediacy and one more human folklore element to ride on. The film also seems to be hyper aware of it's kinship with QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.

Everytime I pop the movie in, it's Peter Firth's supernaturally unflappable Colonel Caine that really does it for me. Talk about stiff upper lip! This guy makes Kenneth More look like Rod Steiger.

Now...Imagine... Apparently, Klaus Kinski was supposed to play Dr. Fallada! Though, I think I'd still prefer the nea-equally-creepy Finlay.

Haven't seen this movie in years but I really liked it. Reading Andrew's description made me remember some scenes that were cool. The whole thing at the beginning was done in in an extremely suspenseful way, got me hooked good.

Logged

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy...But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

This is a fantastic B-movie that just forges ahead, giving the audience what it wants (= more Mathilda May!), regardless of logic. But I could swear I already read this review before it's publication date of 1/17/08. Has it been reposted?

Logged

"The basic plot is that Donna Speir and Hope Marie Carlton, the two undercover DEA agent Playboy Playmates from the last movie, are still running around in jungle shorts, cowboy boots and spaghetti strap T-shirts, firing their machine guns at drug smugglers, Filipino communist guerrillas, and corrupt federal agents while their two friends, Lisa London and Miss May 1984 Patty Duffek, lounge around the pool a lot and talk on speaker phones that look like fax machines."-Joe Bob on SAVAGE BEACH

This is a fantastic B-movie that just forges ahead, giving the audience what it wants (= more Mathilda May!), regardless of logic. But I could swear I already read this review before it's publication date of 1/17/08. Has it been reposted?

This is a reader review, so it was first posted to the forum by Bill Adams in the section for reader reviews:

This came out when I was serving in the Navy in Japan; all the sailors naturally loved it. I have a copy taped off a Japanese rental with Japanese subtitles that is over 25 years old; I would love to see it on DVD. What other films has Matilda May done?

She seems to have worked fairly steadily, even if most of her acting has been in European films, since "Lifeforce." Her latest film is "Tu peux garder un secret?" which is in post-production and should be out sometime this year. Her last completed film was last year's "A Girl Cut in Two" to give it its English title.